Why teamwork is crucial to T2S success

Hugh is a specialist in STP, automation/efficiency and outsourcing, in post-trade, clearing/settlement and treasury/payments. Before joining Colt in 2011, he worked both inside Financial Services for banks and brokers and for service providers to the sector.

At Colt, we could have been forgiven for a moment of self-congratulation on hearing from Banca d’Italia that we had been awarded a definitive licence to provide value-added connectivity services to the Target2Securities platform (T2S), as we had worked really hard with SIA to pull together a great team to address all elements of this complex project. In reality, no sooner had we heard the good news, we were working together with SIA to plan the different workstreams required to kick off all that needs to be done to support the 2015 go-live. No time for back-slapping.

Colt has been working with Italian-based payments processor SIA to bid for the design, creation and management of the new network infrastructure to connect central depositories (CSDs), Eurosystem central banks and the leading securities trading and servicing organisations for a number of months. Now we begin the work of building the proof of concept, devising a sales and “go to market” plan, planning the production build, developing commercial and legal artefacts and so on. With an average of 11 million messages per day running across the platform, the security and availability of the platform is absolutely key to building confidence amongst investors around the future financial stability of European markets.

The planning exercise helped us to understand the volume and complexity of work that the T2S project team has had to deal with – and the responsibility that goes with it. Our project – as important and significant as it is – is in reality only one small part of the overall plan that T2S have to pull together, ensuring that all parties march to the beat of the same drum. One way in which the T2S team are able to externalise the project status and synchronisation points with external bodies, is through the T2S Info sessions. The last – in Stockholm – was excellent in terms of information and networking and the next – in Malta in April – promises to be equally good, both Colt and SIA are looking forward to participating now we truly are part of this exciting project.